Man is not guided by his genes and instincts only, we are the victims of heavy conditioning and indoctrination whether we like it or not.

I don't disagree, Quack. Here is my take, which I've posted before and don't think I can improve upon:

It seems axiomatic to me that any person, at any given moment, expresses three tiers of history: one’s personal history, the history of the culture in which one is embedded, and evolutionary history. These are progressively more general, yet expressed simultaneously. As I write these words, I express ideas that arise from a personal history that is in many ways contingent and idiosyncratic - as is everyone’s - hence the uniqueness and incompleteness of my subjective view of the world. Simultaneously, these words carry forward elements of my enclosing culture, in that their lexical meanings and grammatical functions were historically established and stabilized within our language community over no more than the last 7000 years, the span over which languages as diverse as Sanskrit, Gaelic, Latin, and Greek evolved from a common linguistic ancestor. Hence their appearance here simultaneously reflects something of my own purposing and a contingent thread of Western linguistic history, as carried forward in both writer and reader. Also reflected herein is our human evolutionary heritage. Arguably, the ability to both construct and comprehend grammatically complex speech is an evolutionary adaptation of the human species (e.g., Pinker and The Language Instinct).

All told, each of us carries forward, and is embedded in, an astounding quantity of personal, cultural and biological history, with the result that many human psychological states often carry “the ancient alongside the new” (thank you Daniel Povinelli). On this view, there is no necessary contradiction between explanations at the individual, cultural, and evolutionary levels; all may, and oftentimes must, operate simultaneously in human behavior.

--------------Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be.

"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."- David Foster Wallace

"Hereâ€™s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down."- Barry Arrington

I could artificially breed squirrels and presumably I could eventually produce a flying squirrel. But what if I could not?

I'm sure Patrick is sitting under a giant cardboard pyramid while he types his "wisdom".

That made me chuckle. I picture him in a tinfoil pirate hat, sitting crosslegged on the floor of his cardboard pyramid. I'm just undecided as to whether he's on his mom's living room carpet or her basement floor.

Also, did he use shipping tape or duct tape?

--------------Lou FCD is still in school, so we should only count him as a baby biologist. -carlsonjok -deprecatedI think I might love you. Don't tell Deadman -Wolfhound

I could breed chihuahuas and presumably eventually produce a great Dane, but what if I could not?

let's take this theme and run with it...

I could destroy Darwinism by posting on a blog. But what if I could not?

I could out-bicycle Lance Armstrong. But what if I could not?

I could design an automobile engine that ran on salt water. But what if I could not?

--------------"Rich is just mad because he thought all titties had fur on them until last week when a shorn transvestite ruined his childhood dreams by jumping out of a spider man cake and man boobing him in the face lips." - Erasmus

Earlier this season there was a brilliant episode of My Name is Earl where the ex-wife tries to win a science fair by disproving evolution. Her plan: Making a fish try to evolve legs to get the food she has placed out of reach. Unfortunately for her she uses a tadpole. Her conclusion on seeing the results: "I guess we don't have to go to church any more."

I very much imagine our friends at UD at that level in their efforts.

--------------"Creationists think everything Genesis says is true. I don't even think Phil Collins is a good drummer." --J. Carr

"I suspect that the English grammar books where you live are outdated" --G. Gaulin

Earlier this season there was a brilliant episode of My Name is Earl where the ex-wife tries to win a science fair by disproving evolution. Her plan: Making a fish try to evolve legs to get the food she has placed out of reach. Unfortunately for her she uses a tadpole. Her conclusion on seeing the results: "I guess we don't have to go to church any more."

I very much imagine our friends at UD at that level in their efforts.

But she actually performed the experiment. Doesn' that put her one up on the UDenizens?

Earlier this season there was a brilliant episode of My Name is Earl where the ex-wife tries to win a science fair by disproving evolution. Her plan: Making a fish try to evolve legs to get the food she has placed out of reach. Unfortunately for her she uses a tadpole. Her conclusion on seeing the results: "I guess we don't have to go to church any more."

I very much imagine our friends at UD at that level in their efforts.

But she actually performed the experiment. Doesn' that put her one up on the UDenizens?

I'll go sit in the corner and think about what I did.

--------------"Creationists think everything Genesis says is true. I don't even think Phil Collins is a good drummer." --J. Carr

"I suspect that the English grammar books where you live are outdated" --G. Gaulin

Just in case you haven't been receiving admiring private email, I love the new avatar.

All the boys (except Arden) here are no doubt too jealous and homophobic (except Arden) to note it.

Maya

Trust me, the picture is way too flattering. I happen to know for a fact that this is a much more accurate picture of what Lou really looks like:

--------------"Rich is just mad because he thought all titties had fur on them until last week when a shorn transvestite ruined his childhood dreams by jumping out of a spider man cake and man boobing him in the face lips." - Erasmus

Earlier this season there was a brilliant episode of My Name is Earl where the ex-wife tries to win a science fair by disproving evolution. Her plan: Making a fish try to evolve legs to get the food she has placed out of reach. Unfortunately for her she uses a tadpole. Her conclusion on seeing the results: "I guess we don't have to go to church any more."

I very much imagine our friends at UD at that level in their efforts.

But she actually performed the experiment. Doesn't that put her one up on the UDenizens?

Earlier this season there was a brilliant episode of My Name is Earl where the ex-wife tries to win a science fair by disproving evolution. Her plan: Making a fish try to evolve legs to get the food she has placed out of reach. Unfortunately for her she uses a tadpole. Her conclusion on seeing the results: "I guess we don't have to go to church any more."

I very much imagine our friends at UD at that level in their efforts.

But she actually performed the experiment. Doesn't that put her one up on the UDenizens?

LOL yep. They would just sit around and blog about what would happen.

They would let her do the experiment and then quote mine the result claiming that ID predicted it all along.

--------------...after reviewing the arguments, Iâ€™m inclined to believe that the critics of ENCODEâ€™s bold claim were mostly right, and that the proportion of our genome which is functional is probably between 10 and 20%. --Vincent Torley, uncommondescent.com 1/1/2016

djmullen: Let’s use an extremely small bacteria, one with only a single protein gene... Dembski and Marks seem to think the bacteria has to find this sequence via some sort of a search process, which starts with every conceivable DNA sequence that will fit into the gene and rejects all but the single sequence of DNA bases that will produce the correct protein... What the bacteria does instead is much simpler - it merely makes an exact copy of its DNA, including the section that codes for that protein, and hands that copy down to its offspring... Suppose that a single base-pair in one of the 500 protein genes gets mutated during reproduction. That means that the other 499 protein genes are good ones because they didn’t mutate and are identical to their parent’s. So the bacteria isn’t chosing a point in the search space at random, it’s choosing a point that is so close to where it started from that 499 out of 500 protein genes are known to be correct.

I would agree. I would only emphasize that we're talking about a population. So even if a particular bacteria suffers a significantly deleterious mutation, there are plenty of sisters that have the original complement of genes. Some variations can have both beneficial and deleterious effects, and in a changing environment, there may be an ebb-and-flow. Indeed, a natural population typically consists of many competing varieties.

--------------Proudly banned threefour five times by Uncommon Descent.There is only one Tard. The Tard is One.